


Salt and Iron

by whiskyandwildflowers



Category: The Old Guard (Comics), The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: A conversation between two old romantics, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Nine hundred years of fighting and fucking, Pillow Talk
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-04
Updated: 2020-08-04
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:53:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25701652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskyandwildflowers/pseuds/whiskyandwildflowers
Summary: Strapped down in a lab and contemplating their shared history is Joe and Nicky's version of pillow talk.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 45
Kudos: 530





	Salt and Iron

**Author's Note:**

> Joe and Nicky live in my head rent free.

“Do you remember how we started,” Nicky asks, voice choked and muffled as he holds onto whatever breath he can grab.

With the way time passes for them, it could easily be a hundred years later. It sometimes feels like twenty minutes. In truth, it’s been almost a millennium, longer than most bloodlines can even hope to last. 

“How we started, or how we _started_?” Joe asks, using the last of his energy to turn his head in the restraints, drinking in any half-lidded glance at Nicky he can.

“Yusuf.” And even now, strapped down in this lab, staring the remainder of his impossible life square in the eyes, Joe could listen to the way Nicky holds his name in his mouth for the rest of eternity. He hopes to. 

“ _Nicolo.”_

Nicky shifts, hissing as his raw skin grazes against the restraints. “Be serious, Joe. I—”

Joe closes his eyes, sinking into hundreds of years worth of memories to find the few most worth saving—the ones he’d cling to, beaten and bloody-knuckled at the end of the world. 

“We were forged in salt and iron, you and I. That’s not something you easily forget, even for relics like us,” Joe says through a grin, the skin of his mouth cracking around the shape. 

“I’d never hated someone so much in my life,” Nicky laughs, a fond sound above the sterile beeping of the monitors. 

“The stabbing was the first clue,” Joe smirks. All of his deaths are tied to Nicky, the first hundred, give or take, holding the most special place. 

“The first strike was all you.”

Joe slits open an eye again. “Oh, so he does remember.”

“A man remembers the first time he dies,” Nicky snorts, then turns somber. “And kills.”

“It’s kill or be killed, baby,” Joe retorts. 

“Mostly for us, it’s just been kill,” Nicky answers, swallowing around his emotions. 

Though it’s hazy around the edges, the memory of Nicky’s righteous and bloodthirsty fury will always light Joe up from the inside out. It might be strange, to remember so fondly the way your love once pined for your death, but Joe doesn’t know any other way to be. Love and death and Nicky are so intertwined in the fabric of his soul, the old wounds long since forgiven. 

“You’re always so beautiful with blood in your teeth,” Joe says, wishing desperately he could touch Nicky. Even with his eyes closed, he can see the furrow of Nicky’s brow, deep in contemplation around their shared history and he longs to smooth it out. The worst kind of torture he’s endured by far is this, mere feet away from Nicky and unable to press his nose against the soft skin of his neck. Unable to run his thumb over the worried crease in his brow.

“Salt and iron, you said it yourself.”

“The smell of rust in winter. You know I’ll always lick the salt from your wounds,” Joe babbles. Their first kiss had been full of blood, and to this day any good fight makes him crave Nicky. The taste of him is in every bullet hole and broken tooth. In every death. 

“Neither of us are in any condition for that,” Nicky laughs weakly. 

“But you considered it for a moment,” Joe counters.

“Does this count as pillow talk?” A smirk weaves its way around Nicky’s every syllable, impressive given their current state of affairs.

“Not unless there’s an actual pillow, which I see no signs of here.”

“Don’t let that stop you, I’m finally enjoying myself a little here,” Nicky teases. 

“What do you want me to talk about?” Joe asks. “About the first time we made love, right there in the dirt of a burnt-out battlefield.”

“You mean the first time we fucked.”

“I mean the first time we made love. Don’t pretend that isn’t what it was,” Joe murmurs.

Nicky shifts again. “I don’t think that version of us would agree with you very much.”

“Well, we do have the advantage of nine hundred years worth of hindsight.”

“True. The naivete of youth.”

“And the way you cradled my head couldn’t have been mistaken for anything else.”

“If I recall, I bashed it into a rock once we were done,” Nicky fires back.

And he had. 

“I always wanted to carry the pain of you with me,” Joe whispers, stoking the tender tendrils of a memory as it curls in his mind. The memory of how he'd always tried to savour the lushly torturous drag of Nicky moving inside of him for as long as possible after they were done, cursing their inhumanity when it healed and was gone all too soon.

“So did I. Still do.”

The centuries flood through Joe then. His every sense memory is so thoroughly tied to Nicky after nine hundred years. The words haven’t been created to accurately state his feelings, though he’s tried so hard. _Love_ doesn’t feel like it cuts deep enough. Nicky is everything, pleasure and pain and love and loss. They’ve been together so long that no language has the range to describe them. Joe doesn’t remember his mother or his father, or the faces of most of his kills. He has forgotten so much more than most generations could hope to ever learn. But the day he forgets the first time Nicky laid him out, harsh and broken and ripe with the death they couldn’t give each other, that’s the day he hopes his end has come. 

Nicky breaks the silence, rousing Joe from his daydreams and jolting him back to yet another one of their harsh realities. “If you leave me, I won’t be far behind. I know we don’t get to choose but—”

“Don’t.”

“It would be my time then.”

The thought of Nicky’s death, the true, _real_ death, turns Joe’s bones to ice, but he laughs anyway. “Not even the stars would separate us. They brought us together, after all.”

“You think it’s the stars?” Nicky asks, already knowing the answer to this, of course. They’ve had nothing but time to ponder this, and it’s an old, circular discussion they’ve had hundreds of times.

“Well, it’s certainly not any god I’ve ever heard of. It's lucky for us, how the stars tied you to me and wrote our history before we even met. Where one goes, the other will follow.”

“I wouldn’t call us lucky, but—”

“I would.”

“What?”

“Call us lucky.”

Nicky hums. “I find that hard to believe, given our current situation.”

“We’re still together, aren’t we?”

“I can’t believe I forgot what a romantic you are,” Nicky says, brittle and sweet. 

“No, you didn’t.”

“No, I didn’t.”

The machinery whirs around them as Joe turns to face Nicky again and peels his eyes open. Heat weakly curls in the pit of his belly even now as they lock eyes. He’ll raze the entire Earth to the ground if he never gets to feel Nicky against him again. 

“We’re getting out of here,” Joe says.

“I know you think that.”

“I know it. Just as I know you. They’ll come for us and we’re getting out, and I’m going to bring you to bed for an entire week.”

“You think highly of yourself.”

“And now you wound me,” Joe answers. “When we get out of here, I’ll have you inside of me and against me and the taste of you on my tongue, and when I’m done the only name you’ll remember is going to be mine.”

“Yours is the only one worth remembering anyway,” Nicky says softly. 

And for all Joe gets the credit of being the poetic romantic between them, Nicky can flay him bare so simply, still, after all this time. 

“We’re getting out of here.”

The door flies open.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me on [tumblr](https://whiskyandwildflowers.tumblr.com)


End file.
